Warms You Twice
by William Easley
Summary: As a birthday present, Wendy promised Soos a big load of firewood for the Shack. Now Dipper helps her deliver. Just a little slice-of-life one-shot, with some gentle, understated Wendip.


_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them._

* * *

 **Warms You Twice**

 **(July 18-25, 2016)**

* * *

Dan Corduroy scratched his untamed beard. "How many cords you plannin'?" he asked.

It was a Sunday evening. Wendy, sitting across the dinner table from her dad, pushed a sheet of lined paper over to him. "Well, the only place where Soos burns it is the big fireplace," she said. "He keeps the chimney cleaned, and it has a good draw. I've figured the whole square footage on the main floor that the fireplace heat reaches at about 966. So I'm thinking that three cords would do it."

"You mean full cords and not—"

"Not face cords, no," Wendy said. "Full."

A full cord of firewood is a stack eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet tall. A face cord is less than half the volume, eight feet wide, four tall, but each log is only sixteen inches long. A pickup load, on the other hand, gives you less wood than either of these two but is often sold as a cord. Stanley Pines isn't the only one whose business gets a little tricky.

Dan ran over her figures. "Yeah, these add up," he said. "OK, three cords won't be a problem. When we cleared off the land for the two Pines houses, we stacked the logs way down beside Weaver's Creek. You can get there by the logging trail through the woods—it comes out on Route 111-C, you know—"

"I know the territory," Wendy said with a smile. "What kind of variety are we talking here?"

"Let me see. Dozen oaks, you could just cut oak easy, but you prob'ly want more than one kind. There's two sizable madrones I hated to cut, you don't often find 'em this far from the coast, but they was just in the wrong place. They're back there, get a cord off them easy. That's a good fireplace wood—"

"I know, Dad," Wendy said, smiling. "Low ash, no bark to deal with, give you good heat. OK, oak and madrone. Anything special?"

"Couple of little old wild apple trees. Maybe a third to half a cord."

"That'll be nice," Wendy said. "Smells good. How about Douglas fir?"

"One, I think. Yeah, good-sized one, already cut to about twenty-foot lengths. I'd go for oak before fir, though."

"Yeah, but a little for variety," Wendy said. "Now, are you planning to cut all that up and sell it? Because if you are, I'll pay or work it out—"

Dan shook his head. "Nah, not enough to fool with, really. I was gonna let any of my buddies who needed firewood just have it for the cuttin' and splittin'. You sure you don't want me to help you? That's gonna be a good job, probably take you a week on your own. Which you ain't got."

"No, but in the afternoons I can get there from the Shack in half an hour, put in about three good hours of work before the sun goes down, and I can use my Mondays off. I figure two weeks ought to do it, like that. Besides, Dipper says he'll help me."

Dan chuckled. "Baby girl, he might can run, and he sure can figure numbers, but he ain't gonna be much of a sawyer or loader, them little noodly arms of his."

"I think he might surprise you," Wendy said. "Anyhow, I promised Soos firewood for the winter, so that's the plan. It was a birthday present."

"OK." Dan smiled. "Tell you what, the first cuts are the furthest in, up on the bank there. They oughta be good and dry. You get it split, It'll be full-seasoned before January."

"Sounds good." Wendy took back the sheet of notebook paper and wrote _oak, madrone, apple, Doug. fir._ "Now, if I pay for the gas, OK to use the truck, the big chainsaw, and the splitter?"

"Yeah, but I'd say use the heavy splitter, it'll go faster, no charge for that. How about the loader?"

"Nah, too big to wrangle. Let me borrow the ten-foot log trailer and the winch, though. Dip and me'll cut the logs up into eight-foot lengths, then haul 'em to the lumber mill to cut and split."

"Four-foot firewood, huh?" Dan rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, and even though he was the man who had built the central portion of the Shack and in fact had constructed the fireplace, he asked, "You measure that?"

"Fireplace is fifty-four inches wide," Wendy said. "Four-foot logs are just right for it."

Dan grinned but sighed. "Dang, girl, seein' you do this work, I kinda hate you got your heart set on college. You could run this lumber business good as me."

Wendy smiled at her father. "No, I couldn't, Dad. One day Junior will, and the younger boys, and they'll love the work as much as you do. But that's just not where my heart is."

"Yeah, that's the Blerble in you," Dan said. "It's OK. I respect that. When you gonna start?"

"Tomorrow morning early," Wendy said. "It's what Dipper and me are gonna do instead of our run."

"Well," he said with a wink, "keep you outa mischief, anyway."

* * *

And on Monday morning—their day off—Wendy picked Dipper up at seven A.M. for their day of work. As she had advised, he had dressed in a sweatshirt (an old one) and jeans (not his best). She brought him a pair of her brother's old boots, and she advised him to wear them with his thickest socks.

"Sneakers no good, huh?" he asked, lacing up one of the battered boots.

"Really need steel toes for those occasions when something falls on your foot," she said with a grin. "Walk around. Those feel OK? Are they slipping?"

"No, pretty good fit. They're heavy, is all."

"Wait for a few hours," Wendy advised. "Let your legs get a little bit tired. Then see how heavy they are!"

In the parking lot, she showed him the sturdy trailer—mostly home-made, she said. It had two steel frames shaped like inverted V's and a heavy winch, plus a long coil of steel cable. The winch was fastened to the V frame closest to the pickup, and a pulley on the rearmost V frame, which leaned outwards, held the hook on the end of the cable.

"Why couldn't we just use the truck?" Dipper asked.

"Well, first the bed's not hardly long enough for what we need. And second, loading it's harder than dragging the logs into the trailer. I figure we might handle six or maybe eight logs at a time—that's plenty heavy for this rig—and we'll take 'em to Dad's lumber mill to cut them in two and split them."

Dipper groaned, memories of backyard wood splitting for Stan making him remember aching arms and shoulders. "That's the hard part," he said.

She punched his shoulder. "Not with an axe or sledgehammer and wedges, dummy! Dad's got an industrial splitter there. Make things a whole lot easier! You'll see."

They got into the truck cab, Wendy fired up the engine, and they jounced out of the lot and down the driveway, the log trailer clattering so loud they could hardly hear each other. "So how're the refugees doing?" she asked. They had recently helped about a hundred assorted monsters, ranging from six-inch fairies up to eight-foot tall whatchamaycallems, to find temporary lodgings until they could return to the Crawlspace, a cavern far below the grounds of the Mystery Shack, with tunnels leading as far as the edge of town. It had suffered a pretty calamitous fire.

"The Handwitch and her husband are hosting the Slimjim Guy," Dipper said. "He's giving her diet tips, I think. The Maul Chops and the Manotaurs are having a great time together, with only a few serious injuries. And I think Winziger is gonna take on a side job as the Gnomes' accountant."

"Cool," Wendy said. The turn-off onto the logging trail wasn't far, and the truck jounced and juddered over the rutted old surface. Wendy had to jockey the trailer around, but at the end of the trail, where it widened out, she managed to back it up to the base of a gentle slope that led down to Weaver's Creek, a piddling little stream that was not very impressive at this time of year.

They weren't far off the road, but it felt like deep woods. The everlasting woodpeckers drummed, they caught sight of squirrels and a pair of deer, and the world smelled like pine trees.

"That's the wood?" Dipper asked, appalled. Jumbles of enormous tree trunks lay on the ground, their lengths parallel to the slope.

"That's it," Wendy said. "Come on. It's not as hard as it looks!"

She chose a medium-sized Douglas fir trunk, about 20 inches in diameter, to begin with. As she explained, it was straighter and had fewer branches to trim. She and Dipper used an oversized measuring tape to mark an eight-foot length (he half expected them to go back in time, but it was an ordinary tape), and then she used the heavy chainsaw to cut the log at that point. She gave Dipper an axe and she used one of her own to trim a few branches close to the trunk. "We don't have to make it perfectly smooth," Wendy said. "Just enough so's it'll slide easier."

Then Dipper watched her attach a length of chain to the lower end. She turned on the winch and fed out cable until she could hook it onto the chain, then reversed the winch. "Look how easy now," she said.

And really, it wasn't that hard. Slow, but not hard. "Can't it go faster?" he asked as the log inched its way toward the trailer.

Wendy shook her head and over the whining of the winch, she said, "Geared for power, not speed. Here we go. Up, and it swings in. Pretty as a picture!"

She had positioned a two-foot-tall stump beneath the fir log. She let the leading end settle down onto the bed of the trailer, then repositioned the hook, taking the cable off the rear pulley so the forward winch completed the job of dragging the eight-foot log up into the bed, where it settled with a clatter.

"One down," Wendy said. "Now we just repeat that about six or ten times, and we got ourselves a load of firewood."

She took one more eight-foot length of fir, and then they tackled a medium-sized oak. It grew more crooked than the fir, and Wendy decided they'd just take one length from that trunk because it forked a few feet further up and there were others that wouldn't be as much trouble to trim. Then she picked a thinner tree, yellow-red. "Know this one?" she asked.

Thanks to their touch-telepathy, he did. "A madrone," he said.

"Yep. Best of the evergreens for firewood, my opinion," Wendy agreed. "Bark comes right off. Fun's gonna come when we split this one. It's knotty and kinda hard to work with, and you have to have the fire going already before putting it on, but man, it burns so clean and it leaves very little ash. Here we go. Gotta cut the crown off first."

She did, and then they used axes for most of the branches. That was hard work, making Dipper sweat. The wood was very tough.

However, despite its irregular surface, it dragged easier than either the fir or the oak, and they got two good lengths of it up onto the trailer. Then Wendy suggested a break, so they sat on a fallen log near the little creek and had a soda each. "How're you liking logging?" she asked him.

"Well—I've had more relaxing times," he admitted. "But being with you is great."

"Same here, man. OK, I think three more logs will be as much as we want to haul right now. We did good, Dip! We can get to the lumber mill before ten, and I'll bet we have us at least half a cord by two this afternoon. Let's go!"

They cut and dragged, and then Wendy started the engine to haul the load down the logging trail. They had secured the load with heavy chains, and once they were sure the logs wouldn't shift around, Wendy had taken off her gloves and Dipper peeled his off. "Tired?" Wendy asked him.

"Kinda," he confessed. "Like after a hard track training session. But it's not a bad kind of tired."

He had never visited the lumber mill of Corduroy Wood before. A small crew was working there, but the big four-ton log splitter was available. A guy named Hank came over, recognized Wendy, and asked if she needed help.

"Got some," she said, indicating Dipper. "Just a greenhorn logger, but he's willing to learn!"

They used a loader to offload their logs. Wendy "bucked" them, loading them across a couple of pine logs so they were held off the ground. Then she wielded a snarling chain saw to cut them into four-foot lengths. And then the part that Dipper had been dreading—which turned out to be nothing to worry about. They loaded the four-foot sections of log onto a commercial splitter, which shoved them through a four-way cutter and gave them four giant-sized pieces of firewood.

"We'll split each one again," she said. "That'll make them the right size for Soos to burn in the fireplace."

It took an amazingly short time, and they finished before noon. "Feel like another shift?" she asked him. "We can have lunch and then go back for another load. We got just under half a cord, so one more trip and we'll be a third of the way to the goal."

"Sounds good," he said.

They went into town and stopped at Greasy's for lunch, where the saw Stan and Sheila. Stan called them over and said, "Sit with us!"

When they had ordered, Sheila asked, "What are you two doing? You look like you've been out in the woods."

"We have," Wendy said. "I promised Soos a load of winter firewood as his birthday present, and Dipper's helping me bring it in."

"Learnin' to be a lumberjack, huh?" Stan asked.

"No, a logger," Wendy corrected.

Stan's eyebrows shot up. "What's the diff?"

"Well," Wendy said, "a logger's somebody who works for a living, cutting down trees, producing lumber, and that jazz. A lumberjack's a logger who shows off—like I did when I was a kid and won all those lumberjack games—tree climbing, log rolling, that stuff."

"So it's better to be a logger?" Stan asked.

She grinned. "You can be both!"

"Hey, Dip," Stan said, "so how do you like it? Hard work?"

"Pretty hard," Dipper told him. "But I don't mind. It keeps me busy, and the company is good!"

Stan laughed. "You're shapin' up good, kid! Proud of you!"

Lazy Susan brought their orders over, and both Dipper and Wendy tucked into the food. They'd built up quite an appetite.

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _It's Monday evening, just after dinner, and ordinarily, Wendy and I might go to town for a date—movie or something. But not tonight. Tonight I am tired out._

 _And in awe of my Lumberjack Girl. Between us today we cut and split over a full cord of firewood. Took us three trips, but we did it! And I think I worked as hard as I ever have at anything. And I made mistakes, and I got splinters, and right now my shoulders and arms are aching._

 _But I've gained a whole new kind of respect for Wendy and her dad. He loves her a lot—he would have to, to build up his business and give his family the good life they have. That's not something a lazy or a weak man could do._

 _And I think I understand Wendy's gift to Soos better now. Mabel and I spent a little money and got Soos something he can listen to his music on, and he liked that. But Wendy's putting more than money into her gift—she's buying it with know-how and with sweat._

 _I'll have to remember that. It's one more way of saying "I love you."_

 _In the future, I'll have to say it to Wendy that way._

 _Because it's deeper than a gift bought with just money._

 _And now, even though it's still light outside—_

 _I am going to bed!_

* * *

The End


End file.
